6 ms·

So pg was wrong, the greatest hackers don't use Lisp, they write in (and invent) obscure versions of C all day.

• ra 15y ago
  One of my favourite hackers is an academic who creates languages just for fun.
• cygwin98 15y ago
  Great hackers can use whatever languages/tools they like. The fact that they're being great is not the consequence of the tools they chose, but of the masterpiece work they achieved. I am always fond of such an analogy: in terms of efficiency, the greatest hackers has an algorithmic complexity of O(1); meanwhile, the majority of us may be O(n), if you can manage to get a O(log n) you can make into the club of good hackers. The tools, be it OS, programming languages, etc, are only a constant coefficient to that complexity, i.e., they can make you noticeably more efficient, but they won't improve your "greatness".
  • phaedrus 15y ago
    Close but I think you have your orders understated. A normal programmer faces O(n^2), while a great programmer achieves O(n log n). Really bad programmers do O(k ^n) amount of work to achieve the same, with k>2.
    • onewland 15y ago
      Why k > 2? k > 1 is bad enough. Otherwise, recursive fib(n) would be just fine (O(~1.618^n)).
      • Retric 15y ago
        Because 1.00000000000001 ^ N is not bad for most values of N that you will actually use.